


La Traviata

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Fluff and Smut, Happy Ending, Introspection, Operas, Post-Endgame, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 22:52:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8178838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "He takes her to the opera..." A post 'Endgame' fix it. For adults. The way it should have been.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiaCooper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/gifts).



> Author's notes:  
> Because I have a huge part of my brain dedicated just to 'Endgame' fix its. I might write them all one day, but this one wouldn't leave me.
> 
> Mia Cooper, my insanely talented beta, made this better and much more readable. I am indebted to her, and so this is her gift. 
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: 'La Traviata' is Verdi's and he deserves all the credit. I do not own the characters, or any plot/ references which are clearly CBS' or Paramount's. I make no monetary gain from this.

 

 

* * *

He takes her to the opera.

It’s a moment of inspiration, perfect in its rightness - a holo-poster glimpsed as he passed under an awning just a few blocks from Central Park – and he huddles from the rain and walks quickly towards the transporter on the corner.

Three days cooped in the Intelligence offices have exhausted him, and he finds himself missing San Francisco. He’s found it hard to sleep.

There’s more air there, and the sea and the Bay, and she’s there.

And so is the place he’s come to call home.

He doesn’t know how it happened but they’ve slid into a routine that mimics a relationship, and misses the mark just slightly. He also cannot fathom why they can’t seem to exact a pattern that sees their relationship…progress, he thinks delicately.

He doesn’t want to consider the implications of being unable to move beyond what is there.

He deftly refuses to.

He’s trying to be patient, and he’s trying to believe that when she glances at him – from over a PADD, or over their shared dinner table, or as she excuses herself to bed - and her eyes glitter from below her long eye lashes, that he’s not mistaking friendship for something more profound.

And he tries to control his body every time she flounces past him, slick in satin or silk. Or when she bends, unawares, over the replicator to seduce it into doing what she wants.

After the debriefings were over, six months previously, he’d had nowhere to go. Things with Seven, whatever those things were, were long since over - to his own embarrassed relief - , his name was cleared, his next commission was set.

He’d been utterly alone.

And now he has, nearly but not quite, everything he’s ever wanted.

He’ll take her to the opera.

 

**-0-**

 

She hadn’t imagined this would be her life, six months after _Voyager_. She isn’t perturbed by it, not in the slightest, but when she’d imagined life after _Voyager_ , it hadn’t been this.

This imitation of domesticity. This strange simulacrum of a relationship.

She stands up, stretches her arms up and over her head and breathes in the cool sea air that’s lazily circulating the large sitting room. She’s idled too long today – a rarity, in the half a year of interviews and debriefings and evaluations and public appearances – and she feels tired, simply because she’s done nothing.

That’s not strictly true. She’d read, restlessly, and glanced at the door every few minutes.

He is due to come home today.

She’d drank a lot of coffee and contemplated getting a puppy, before she realised she might have to consult him.

She doesn’t fully understand why the desire to consult him seems paramount, because she doesn’t quite know how he got here.

 She also doesn’t know why she should consult him but she _wants_ to. That, in and of itself, surely conveys what this is becoming. And she wants to run.

He’d nowhere on Earth to go – and that’s no exaggeration – and he’d just followed her home to the apartment she’d secured, the morning after the homecoming celebration, because they’d spent so long tied to each other.

She hadn’t said no to him; she couldn’t. And she didn’t want to.

 

And anyway, the thought of sleeping with anything other than the distance of a wall between them – a substitute for seven years of a bulkhead – filled her with terror.

So she’d let him follow her home, and he’d taken the larger of the two spare rooms - the one right beside her bedroom -  in the outrageously spacious sandstone she’d decided on, with no idea how she was going to fill the vastness of it with the thinness of her life.

With him there, it hadn’t been hard at all to fill the spaces she’d suddenly taken possession of. Photographs had appeared, routines had established themselves, replicators had been programmed, dinners had been shared, and books and bottles of real wine, and baths had been drawn.

But beds have been very separate.

With just a few inches of wall between them. If she’s honest, and it pains her to be honest about this, she sleeps with her shoulder jammed against the plaster and her cheek against the cool surface just so she can be nearer him.

It’s the only way she can find sleep.

She lifts her head as she hears the bleep of the door, and his footsteps (shuffling to a stop to shed his boots at the little alcove, to the left of the console table which always has fresh roses, and where she abandons her shoes too) and tries not to look intensely interested in his return.

But he never lets her away with that. He knows she’s feigning disinterest.

“Hello,” he is smiling that disarming smile as he sheds his coat and leaves it over the arm of the chair that has become his.

He comes towards her, leans over, placing his hands on the headrest at either side of her head, and bends to kiss her. He smells of confinement, of the city, of a familiarity she never thought she’d miss.

It would only take the slight recalibration of her neck to ensure he touches her lips rather than her cheek, but her neck is tense with solidity and a refusal to bend to the thrumming will that’s passing through her. She doesn’t breathe.

And his lips linger longer than they should, but certainly not as long as she wants them to.

“Have you had a good day, Kathryn?”

He pulls back after a moment, then he retreats to his chair. He steals a sip of her coffee as it lies – ready to be claimed – on the table between them.

She frowns and he grins from behind her battered mug.

“A lazy day,” she slides down into the deep cushions of the couch she chose and he approved of. “Very lazy.”

“That’s about to change,” he informs, eyes intense as he watches her. “We’re going out.”

“Where?”

“It’s a surprise,” he stands. “Dress for a date. You still know how to do that?”

He is teasing but, just behind the jocularity, there is a seriousness to his words that pique her curiosity, and her reluctance.

She tilts her chin up imperiously, despite the trembling sensation of panic that’s emanating in her breastbone.

She’s wondered when this moment would come and now it’s here, it’s terrifying.  And she wants it. Perhaps that is what terrifies her so much.

“I believe I do.”

He smiles, shakes his head a little.

“I know you do.”

He stalls just at the door to the hallway, while she’s half lost in vexation and half demented about what she is going to wear.

The infantile fluttering of that kind of worry nearly disarms her. She hasn’t worried over anything like this in nearly eight years and she wants to scold herself, but she doesn’t.

It’s giddying.

“I’m going to shower. No combadge Kathryn, not tonight.”

She simply nods; it would have destroyed the look she had in mind anyway. 

And the tone of his voice shatters the blankness she’s been pretending lies between her legs for months.

He takes her to the opera.

When they transport into New York, she’s not sure about where they’re going, or why he’s being suddenly so mysterious, but she revels in the mystery.

And hates it all at once.

He’s wearing a suit, and that in itself is sight enough to panic her. And it makes her lose any sense of what is appropriate thought, destroying the lingering sense that she can resist him. It hangs on him with an ease she finds mildly appalling, reluctant to believe anything can look so effortlessly good.

Both of them are in better shape now than they were at the end of _Voyager_ , and that’s mostly down to his home cooking and her sudden new-found love for walking – now that she can – wherever and as far as she pleases. And the absence of the incredible pressure under which they’d been functioning for nearly a decade.

On pleasant days, at the end of their arduous shifts at HQ, they go for walks through the Presidio. People look, and openly discuss, but they’ve stopped speculating.

She didn’t love the speculation, but she didn’t mind it. And she suspected he didn’t either. 

The fountain at the heart of the Lincoln Centre dances merrily, and Julliard and the Metropolitan glitter grandly, white in the dying light of a biting autumn.  She’s been here before – she used to come with Mark – but it feels completely new, and very real.

He takes her hand, the warmth of it bleeding through the soft leather of her gloves, as they ascend the stairs.

She shifts the hold, so their fingers slide neatly into a complex lock of fingers. At the top, he lifts her hand and kisses the back of it.

There’s something so chivalrous about it, she nearly balks.

Then he smiles, and the smile robs her, in a delicious way, of her breath. 

 _There_ , she thinks, _is the Chakotay I want._

“You’re taking me to the opera,” she says, voice whisper-quiet for fear it might betray her.

“I’ve never taken you on a proper date,” he guides her into the sparkling, heaving foyer, hand firm and very much there on the lower portion of her back. “Where does one take Kathryn Janeway on a date? I asked myself. Not the holodeck, because that never worked for me in the past and god knows I tried. And not a bar – she’ll drink too much, because I’ll encourage her, and we’ll laugh too much and then she’ll fall asleep on my shoulder. Not dinner, too prosaic. Not romantic enough. Not suggestive enough.”

“Here will do fine,” she drawls, with a brow arching just to ensure he’s not too easily victorious.

He laughs at the unspoken reasoning passing between them.

“Maybe when I was younger,” she takes a glass of champagne - no synthehol here - from the usher awaiting them within the confines of a narrow corridor, down which he’s led her. “A bar would have suited your purpose.”

The usher escorts them into a secluded box, darkened and angled to allow an unparalleled view of the stage, and smiles shyly when she works out who they are.

“You’re Captain Janeway. And Commander Chakotay,” the usher traces the side of her own temple absently, as if she has a tattoo as well.

“We are.”

Kathryn tries to be gracious with people, and she doesn’t correct the girl’s incorrect rankings, but Chakotay’s lost the little patience he’d had for their ill-gained celebrity a long time ago.

“That will be all,” he motions to the bottle of champagne that’s languishing on an outcropping of ice in a silver bucket, to the left of two plush seats.  “If we need more, I shall let you know. Thank you.”

The girl takes it as her cue to leave, and she turns a disapproving look on him as the curtains are tugged to a close behind her.

“That was rude,” she says softly, but it’s half-hearted.

He doesn’t answer but he does touch her shoulder slightly, and propels her to turn and face out into the auditorium. People are filling in all around them and below, but there’s an anonymity that is dangerous in its appeal. They are totally secluded. She wonders, with panic split firmly between desire and terror, what he has planned.

His fingers caress her shoulder through her coat momentarily, as he stands just inches from her back – so near she can feel the heat seeping from his body into hers – before they move to the delicate skin of her neck, just below her ear.

His fingers draw a tiny, small pattern. It’s incomprehensible, and the touch sends her spinning.

She might die from the intensity of it. She wonders how she could have lived with him, for nearly eight years, and never have felt this as it is demanding to be felt now.

She did feel it, of course, she just didn’t act on it. A world of difference is in that tiny distinction.

And she thinks, with mildly amused disapproval, this is just a little forward for a first date.

Then they are trailing down her back, and his hands slip round the belted waist of her coat, to settle on the buckle for a long, warm moment. He pulls her a little nearer, flush and quick against him, so he can get leverage as he works the belt from its metal clasp, and he does it with such slow precision that she wonders if he’s just never undone a belt before.

But she’s not that naïve.

And from what she feels pressing into the base of her back, he doesn’t want anything that resembles naivety tonight. Her gentle, placid First Officer wants her.

And it crackles as a realisation between them.

She watches his disembodied hands with a curiosity akin to horror, the belt falling open to graze the sides of her hips. He undoes the buttons next, lowest first to the top. His wrists graze over her breasts. When he reaches the top, his fingers dip into the double-breasted collar of the coat, deeper than they need to go and linger there on the bare skin of her décolletage, to slide it off her shoulders.

He takes her to the opera, and he strips her of her last remaining boundary.

It’s a wonder she’s still lucid, because she hasn’t drawn breath in what feels like minutes.  When he pulls the coat from her body, he moves and sets it on the chair – taking painful care to lay it out so it doesn’t wrinkle – and she leans against the side of the box as he does it. She tries to breathe.

When he looks up, his face hardens for a moment, becoming dark. Immediately she panics, but the panic dissipates almost instantly when she recognises that look for what it is.

She’s seen it before, in other men and in him, but usually he’s better at checking it.

Then he confirms it.

“You look beautiful.”

‘Beautiful’ isn’t the right word, and it isn’t the look she was going for. But he’s too polite, and far too embroiled, to tell the truth.

It’s not inappropriate – Janeway long ago learned that she was far more desirable when she left what she could to the imagination – but it’s not a Starfleet uniform either. It’s tight across her breasts and down lean ribs, and midnight blue, and skims over her hips and dips just enough at the top and falls to just below her knees, where there’s a split on one side that implies something of a decent thigh.

 She feels good in it, she feels confident wearing this…and confident in his approval.

“Thank you.”

He offers his hand and brings her round to sit on the plush velvet and gilded seat.

The orchestra warms up discordantly, and they don’t exchange any words as champagne is slowly, languorously consumed. When the lights dip, and the entr’acte begins, he leans towards her.

“When we get home tonight, we won’t be sleeping apart.”

She simply nods.

And then he places his hand on her thigh, fingers warm on her crossed leg, snug in the space where the top of her thigh is in contact with the other.

It’s a very possessive thing, she realises, and she realises she wants that. She wants him to fill every single space that’s left in her.

He takes her to the opera, and she becomes completely lost.

The story is desolate, and beautiful; a destroyed woman, rent to pieces by circumstance and life, falls in love with an idealist who fights for her, with a dogged determination, despite who and what she is. She rejects him, and he persists.

He gives her a rose in the first act.

They find something of happiness, isolated from the rest of the world and their responsibilities, and then circumstances tear them apart again.  She goes back to what she knows.

She isn’t right for him, and she knows she has other things she must do, and over him – and for him – these things must become her priority.  She has to protect him.

So she gives herself fully, doggedly, with a determination for destruction, to the forces which drive her and by which she is to be held in bondage. She becomes consumed. And he doesn’t know what to do. He looks elsewhere – prettier, chaste, less jaded girls.  And she fucks other men.

Maybe Chakotay knows the looking-glass to be found in this story, or maybe it’s coincidental. She doesn’t want to decide. Then she knows it’s a calculation on his part and she’s not angry, or affronted, she’s relieved.

She’s relieved he’s taken this decision out of her hands.

She leans forward, elbows pressed to the velvet cushion running the length of the ledge, and watches, rapt.

Kathryn doesn’t want her to die at the end – even though she’s seen it before and she knows Violetta does -  it’s too near the edges of what she’s known, what she’s danced, perilously, upon.

As the character sings her final, aching aria, tears begin to slide down and over her own cheeks. She weeps silently. He reaches out a warm, soft hand and brushes them away so tenderly it hurts her.

“Oh Kathryn. It won’t end like that.”

He takes her to the opera, and reminds her of what they had. Or what they could have.

And then she knows why he followed her home. And why he won’t ever be going.  She won’t be able to make him, and she’s suddenly alright with that.

This time they don’t walk, but they don’t run. The journey home, though no more than minutes, feels like hours.

She aches to feel him as deeply as she can.

A current streams between them, and when he pushes their door open she pounces on him before he even has the chance to shut it. He pushes her up against the console table in the hall, the fresh roses flying in an elegant arc to land on the wooden floor underfoot, and the vase to smash into smithereens.

She doesn’t care a whole deal; vases can be replicated.

This can’t.

His mouth is hot, searching, and just shy of painful. She lifts herself up onto the table’s surface, and he grips her hips to assist her, and then she curls her legs around his waist. His tongue is so right, and so real, in her mouth.

The kiss reaches into eternity, and into a part of her she’s had to reclaim, just in this moment.

It spirals into her stomach, downwards between her legs and to the tops of her thighs. It manifests as sodden torridness in her underwear.

He steps back just a little to pull her stilettoes from her feet and they join the glass of the vase on the floor.

Then he’s back between her legs, sliding her coat from her body and onto the table.  She feels him rub against her, solid and ready, and she wonders how he survived it all these years if this is how his body reacts to her.  When she tries to touch him, to feel him just through the straining material of his formal trousers, he swats her hand away.

“I won’t last.”

At least he’s honest. And his grin is both sore and pleased.

She returns the gesture of removing his coat, mouths entwined, suddenly remembering that she needs to feel his skin.  His falls to the floor and her fingers work on the buttons of his shirt, then slip inside to the warmth of his solid chest.

“Kathryn,” his lips drag along her jaw, his fingers weave into her hair, and he slides her back against the wall, pushes her head back for ease of access to her neck. He ravages the skin and she moans, languorously, and cradles his head to her, enjoying the feel of his hair as it slides through her fingers.

He drags his teeth along her collarbones, easing his mouth into the recess between them, leaving a burning kiss there.

“I used to fantasise about your neck,” he murmurs, fingers trailing the fine straps of her dress down.

The dress itself was support enough, so she’d forgone a bra. He grins, wolfishly, when he realises.

“Wringing it?”

She asks dryly and arches into him to ease the way he’s tugging her dress down. It slides over her breasts, he leaves it on her ribcage, and he dips his mouth to devour her. He bites, gently, tugging and delicious. It’s primal, and not at all the tenderness she expected.

But then she always imagined it like this and it’s exactly what she wanted.

He grasps the other breast and it is a reflex to push herself into his hand.

He looks up, withdrawing his mouth from her. The loss of the sensation hurts and she moans. 

“Only sometimes,” he answers eventually, dropping onto his knees and reaching out his leg to kick the door shut finally.

She isn’t even concerned that it was lying opened. 

Or that there must be slithers of glass under his knees. 

If he wants to worship her, it’s likely to hurt. And he’s not a stupid man, – anything but - he knows what he’s signing up for.

He slides his fingers over her calves, over her knees, pushes them apart and continues deftly upwards to push her dress up. She raises her hips up to let him force it over her pelvis and bunch on her waist.

“Hardly Starfleet,” he growls, eyes flitting between the lace of her stockings and her panties.

“You told me to dress for a date,” she says archly, a smile of giddiness threatening to ruin the theatre of it.

“You used to wear _this_ on a date?”

He tugs at the lace across her hips, and she lifts her rear from the table to help him.

“Only if I knew how I wanted it to end…otherwise, the sensible cotton of a well behaved officer,” she watches as her underwear drops to the floor, and she feels almost as if she’s outside her own body.

“Well behaved?”

He asks, words dripping with irony.

He laughs and kisses her thigh, sucks at the skin there in a delightful sting, leaving a rosy bloom of blood at the surface when he pulls away.

He takes her to the opera, then he marks her.

“I could be, if I wanted to…” she loses cohesion as his mouth moves, lightly at first, over her.

 Testing her, and her willingness. He’s hardly shy.

So she won’t be either.

“Harder, Chakotay.”

She grips the edge of the console as he pushes her legs wider and buries his mouth deeply.

It has been so long, she’s forgotten how good this can feel. He slides his hands under her rear and lifts her nearer to his mouth and works her body with a mercilessness which shocks her, fingers gripping the flesh of her rear to bruising. His mouth is on her, tongue hard and hot, his fingers are within her. One, two, and then three.

She feels full and whole and completely willing to do whatever he wants.

She comes quickly, quietly – with a moan she’s terrified will become a scream - but blindingly. She doesn’t know, for moments at a time, where she is and who she is. Her muscles clench in drastic pleasure, and she grinds herself against his tongue until the tightening, agonising, delicious pleasure begins to dissipate.

He stands instantly and then steps back, and the glass crunches below his feet.

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more than I do now,” he says, and it’s both leering and humbled and so entirely genuine.

He licks his lips then drags his hand across his mouth.

“Chakotay, you love me?”

She asks it as if she doesn’t know.

He smiles and shirks his shirt off.  He looks suddenly vulnerable, and not the man who’d just forced her into a submission so entire she felt liberated by it.

Underneath the calm, quiet exterior, he’s always been just a little bit Maquis.

She thinks that’s what she might love most about him after all.

“I love you more than I thought possible.”

It’s heart-breaking as he says it, and reinforcing, all at once.

“I love you too.”

She looks him straight in the eye as she says it, because there must be no doubt.

He smiles as if he didn’t really know either, and it strikes her as a possibility that he didn’t.  She holds her arms open and he curls her around his body.

He takes her to the opera, then he finally takes her to bed.

He carries her from their destroyed hallway and lays her down, in the sheets she’s been desperate to share with him.  She removes what remains of his clothing slowly, kisses the burning skin of his body, and traces the curve of his pectora muscles with her tongue.

“I love you,” she tells him, and she doesn’t know how many times she says it.

“I know,” he replies, though it melts into a near whisper as she takes him in hand. Slowly, steadily. She doesn’t know what he’ll need, or want, her to do.  She feels she should know it, then she reminds herself she has plenty of time. So they kiss gently, her hand moves lazily.

Neither of them want this to be rushed. 

She closes her mouth around him, hair trailing along thighs that tremble under her fingers, and he lies back with his head on her pillow and his fingers twisted in her hair. He moans, thrusts into her throat – stops himself – pulls back. Then when it’s safe, she begins again.

He tastes real and visceral and she wants more, and it sates an appetite she’s long since consigned to memory.

His eyes are closed; an animal resisting primitive urges, and it looks like agony and pure pleasure all at once. The control he’s exercising is almost heroic.

She admires him for it. He’s been waiting a lifetime for this.

Then she admires herself, because she’s waited that long too.

“Too much,” he eventually says. “I need you now.”

She lays back in the white, cool, softness of the sheets and guides him between her legs.  He moves silently, easily, into her.

It hurts, just for an instant, as he pushes past the years of misery and manipulation.

 It feels right. There has to be something of pain with this pleasure.

He takes her to the opera, then he takes her for his.

“La Traviata,” he whispers into her ear as he pushes forward, completely within and without her.

“The Fallen Woman,” she translates, breathily, latching her teeth to the lobe of his ear.

It feels good to fall. 

**-0-**

 

He took her to the opera once, and he does it as much as he can.  Whenever he can.

Sometimes, with their respective roles in ‘Fleet, and her eventual progression into Federation politics, it’s difficult to make time. Life takes over.

But it’s never difficult to make a home.

So when he can, he takes her to the opera, and then he takes her home to the bed they’ve shared for years.

 

 


End file.
